Is Reconciliation Possible After the Election?

The firebomb attack at a G.O.P. office in North Carolina raises the question of how supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will treat each other after the election.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS KEANE / REUTERS

The local Republican Party office in Hillsborough, North Carolina, is tucked into a strip mall called the Shops at Daniel Boone. Early last Sunday morning, a bottle filled with explosive liquid flew through the window and started a fire. On the wall of an adjacent building, the attackers appear to have spray-painted a swastika and the words “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.” No one was hurt, but photographs from the scene show charred papers and yard signs, and a sofa reduced to little more than its springs.

A firebombing at a political party’s office in a swing state three weeks before an election is the kind of moment that many Americans dread in this tinderbox of a year. In a bipartisan spirit not much in evidence these days, a Massachusetts Democrat named David Weinberger, a writer on technology issues, responded by starting a campaign on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. He called for his fellow-Democrats and others to underwrite the reopening of the county G.O.P. office. “This is not how Americans resolve their differences,” he wrote. He raised about thirteen thousand dollars, from more than five hundred contributors, in a matter of hours. “I’m so happy to see Dems fighting hate and violence with LOVE and support :) We go high!” one site visitor wrote. The visitor wasn’t the only one to borrow from First Lady Michelle Obama's line about what to do when someone else “goes low.”

But this was not the only view. Sarah Kendzior, a journalist with a specialty in authoritarian regimes, distilled the sentiments of many when she tweeted that the campaign was both ineffectual (“Violent conspiracy theorists won’t be swayed”) and unjust (“That money will be used by actual people to hurt other actual people”). Every election embitters, but the extremes of this campaign are unique. The quarrelling online over the GoFundMe drive foreshadows a bigger post-election debate. In the event of an increasingly likely Hillary Clinton victory over Donald J. Trump, how will the victors treat the defeated?

If Trump loses, millions of Americans will be dejected and angry; many will be convinced that the election was rigged and that the newly elected President belongs not in the Oval Office but in jail. Meanwhile, many of the victors—having raised their voices against casual talk of sexual assault, proposals to ban an entire religion from entering the country, and mass deportations—will feel that they have rescued the country not just from bad policies but from fascism. In recent weeks, as Clinton’s poll numbers have risen, a conciliatory pro-love argument has emerged that channels Lincoln’s promise of “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” If the North could reclaim the South in that spirit, the argument goes, surely liberals and progressives can embrace their Trump-supporting brethren.

This idea could take many forms. Some speak of finding common ground with Trump supporters on shared areas of disillusionment, such as trade policy. Others are pushing for a more open-ended, get-to-know-each-other-again dialogue. A digital-ad executive named Will Cohen is building, with a partner, a kind of un-Facebook. It is called Bridges, and its purpose is to connect people not with their friends but with those who have different identities, ideologies, and politics. Instead of the grandstanding that occurs on many platforms, Bridges hopes to promote listening by focussing the experience on one-on-one messages rather than social posts.

“Even after the election is over, these people are not going away. They will still have the same feelings, the same anger and the same distrust (regardless of who wins),” Cohen told me in an e-mail. “Bridges aims to ease this tension by allowing both sides to connect and learn from one another.”

The camp favoring grace also has an economic wing: liberals who loathe Trump but also deplore the neoliberal policies that they blame for gutting the American working class—and, in their view, for creating the conditions that gave rise to Trump. Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in The Week, has argued that the far left has an easy path to mercy for Trump supporters. “The capitalist world has to justify the unequal distribution of goods, opportunity, and dignity, and so it generates these ideologies of domination and exclusion,” he wrote. Trump supporters are victims, in this view, of capitalist mythmaking.

Reconciliation as a concept sounds appealing. I have spoken of it publicly a great deal myself this year, in print and at conferences. Yet I have also listened to the eloquent and insistent arguments of those who are wary of such efforts. As Election Day approaches, there are fears of Trump supporters trying to intimidate minority voters at the ballot box or, after the votes are counted, clinging to false claims about a rigged result. “I’m more worried about how they’ll treat us,” Corey Boudreau said, in response to a query that I posted on Twitter.

But it is not only frustration at the militancy of some Trump supporters that discourages many from thinking about reconciliation. There is also a feeling that the Trump voter has already received too much compassion from liberal élites—compassion that distorts reality. “This election has been very instructive to me about who is entitled to the empathy and concern of the press, and who isn’t,” Jamelle Bouie, the chief political correspondent at Slate, has written. At Vox_,_ Dylan Matthews argued last weekend that left-of-center white journalists are “riddled with anxiety about being perceived as out of touch with ‘real America.’ ” This anxiety, he suggested, has caused them to overcompensate by portraying Trumpism not as a choice of people with agency but as a byproduct of social and economic distress.

According to this view, Trump supporters have already benefitted from the kind of empathy that allows us to avoid a reckoning about America’s unresolved racial traumas and, specifically, the discontents of white manhood. The globalization that hit so many American workers did not spare the women who made cars in Detroit or the people of color who built furniture in North Carolina. But it is, by and large, white men, who faced globalization while enduring the loss of their unearned privilege, who have turned to Trump.

If Trump supporters won’t like that framing of the problem, their opponents don’t like the notion of having to help them cope with the loss of their advantages. Still, we are living through a massive transfer of power: the passing of the most powerful country in history, run until lately almost entirely by white men, into the hands of a new majority. All of us have a stake in white men finding a graceful way to share the stage.

Bryan Stevenson, the Alabama civil-rights lawyer (whom Jeffrey Toobin wrote about in the magazine), believes that it is necessary to address past wrongs with truth-and-reconciliation efforts. Stevenson’s approach focusses on creating physical markers of the nation’s racial crimes across the landscape. He is planning the first national memorial to victims of lynching, in Montgomery, Alabama, which will encourage communities around the country to bring a piece of the monument home as the seed of their own local memorials. But Stevenson also told me that our history warns against overemphasizing reconciliation. “In America, after the Civil War, we didn’t want to make the South feel defeated,” he said. “We felt it was more important to reintegrate them into the whole fabric of America. So we let them continue with their abuse and domination of black people.” His hope is that people will discover how present resentments are connected to a history of oppression.

I asked Stevenson if he thought that there was any silver lining to this election. The nastiest contest in memory, after all, has put at the front and center of American life the question of how to ease this transfer of power. Stevenson thought about it, and said, “If anything, the moment seems like a moment of light, because things are being illuminated that have been going on for a very long time.”

Anand Giridharadas is the author of, most recently, “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas.”